Orton's Arm

But how much of that work really needs to be done? What would happen if yards and properties weren't quite so well landscaped? If farming was done by small farmers and automated big farmers instead of the master/illegal immigrant slave plantation model? If wages for unskilled laborers became a little higher, and if it once again became possible to earn an honest, decent living by the strength of your back? If one little enclave of Western Civilization continued to exist? I ask you, would any of these things be a disaster? Are wages for unskilled laborers really so high that we need to absorb millions of new people in an effort to drive them down? Is this war against the American worker really what liberalism has come to stand for?

If you're thinking of the theirs/there's error that you (deliberately?) inserted into one of your earlier posts, yeah I noticed it. But at that point I figured you were just looking for attention, and I wasn't in the mood to give it to you.

Seems like a good candidate to me. We need to do something to address the rampant leadership failure this country faces. And the Hillaries and Obamas and Edwards' and McCains and the other members of the herd ain't gonna cut it. They're too much a part of the Establishment, and the Establishment's too corrupt. Tancredo is a man with some integrity.

You might have remembered a while back how I hinted that the Bills would win the Super Bowl long before you admitted to being wrong about something. Um, yeah. About that . . .

You're clever at coming up with excuses, I'll give you that. (Flashback to many years ago . . .) Tom's mother: "Tom! What's your hand doing in the cookie jar?" Tom: "I was, um, putting cookies back into it." Tom's mother: "And the crumbs on your chin?" Tom: "Well, um, the cookies you made were so tasty, I couldn't help but eat one or two. If you want me to stay out of the cookie jar, make less tasty cookies." Tom's mother: "Nice try, but those cookies were store-bought." Tom: "Well, then, you have a gift for selecting just the right cookies, don't you?" Tom's mother: "Actually, the cookies in the jar were ones you slipped into the shopping cart when I wasn't looking." Tom: "Well, um . . ."

You should feel embarrassed: you don't know how to spell.

Wow! A McDonald's insult! Did you think of that whole McDonald's angle all by yourself? Or did Tom think of it for you? Tom, I'm not saying you do all Ramius's thinking for him or anything. But, um, well, he's starting to smell bad. You forgot to remind him of potty time, didn't you?

My focus was on Ramius, not on you. I'll accuse you of overconfidence at times. And that can mislead you into skimming when you should be doing in-depth reading. But when you pay attention, you can grasp complex concepts. And that's not a compliment you'll hear me paying to Ramius any time soon.

Apparently, someone likes abuse. I guess that would explain why Tom was recently seen coming out of an S&M store with a big bag in either hand. You'd think there'd have been a big grin on his face, but the only one grinning was you . . . How does it feel to be so much of a loser that you actually need to be reminded of the fact on an hourly basis? Eh? Well, I guess you wouldn't be able to answer that, because you don't know any different. You've always been a loser, and you've always need to be reminded of that. But sometimes you forget. You envision yourself in a big SUV or pickup truck--the bigger the better. Not that you're compensating for something. Heavens no! The correlation between the bigness of your desired vehicle and the smallness of your, um, . . . anyway, that correlation is just a coincidence! Correlation does not prove causation! So there you are, driving around in your big SUV, listening to Nickelback, feeling like you're on top of the world. Or at least like you're on top of Tom. But trust me, that's never going to happen. I very much doubt you're allowed to touch Tom, except maybe to kiss his foot. Of course, he responds to that by kicking you in the face. Then again, you'd have been kicked in the face if you hadn't kissed his foot, so it's a no-win situation. Or a win-win in your case, because you like the abuse. After cruising around in your SUV for a while with Nickelback blaring, it finally dawns on you that you're hungry. Half an hour later, you realize you could solve that problem by eating something. You could cook your own meal, but that'd require a) planning skills, b) manual dexterity in a task that doesn't involve masturbation, c) the ability to read a cookbook. Discouraged, you decide to cook one of those instant meals from the grocery store. But the simplest meal you can find involves a three step process; whereas you're only capable of two steps. On a good day. With someone else there to do step 1 for you. And step 2, if that becomes necessary. Incapable of feeding yourself in any other way, you decide to order a pizza. Again. You're fairly sure that unhealthy eating hasn't been proven to shorten one's lifespan. After all, you can't exactly do a double-blind study where you force-feed people healthy or unhealthy food for 50 years. And in your mind, the absence of complete, total, 100% proof in favor of a given proposition is the same thing as disproving the proposition beyond all doubt.

You've been calling me stupid for quite some time. You typically add emphasis to your remarks by scratching an armpit, beating your chest, and swinging skillfully from branch to branch. But apparently you wanted this time around to be special. Using your knuckles and your feet, you walked from your tree all the way to the nearest computer. You tried to type out a long reply; you really did. But that third hand kept getting in the way. You know, that hand you recently had grafted on in an unsuccessful attempt to help you find your own posterior. But your loud screeches attracted the attention of the people around you. As you made faces at the keyboard, they got the idea that you were attempting to make fun of someone online. They put together a generic "you're stupid" post for you, directed at me, and that was that. Later on, they noticed you drooling in the general direction of the keyboard. But they couldn't see inside your head, now could they? Had they been able to, they would have realized that the target of your drool was in fact the keyboard, and you were feeling smug about successfully getting 50% of that drool onto the keyboard. You hoped to someday achieve a similar level of accuracy when using the urinal. But then you noticed a wet warmth spreading through your pants, and realized accuracy in the urinal wouldn't be an issue for a while.

Yes, that law was clearly a mistake. It actually discouraged car companies from going forward with their electric cars, so that they could fight it. Other than the fact an oil company bought up that car battery company, I don't see anything else that's truly suspicious going on. My hope for the future is that entrepreneurial, new electric car makers put all the legacy car manufacturers out of business. This would have several benefits: We'd be getting rid of American union labor, and switching to American non-union labor We'd help our balance of trade by giving companies like Phoenix market share currently controlled by foreign auto makers. We'd get rid of the diseased corporate culture that exists in Detroit firms. Cars wouldn't pollute. If today's cars are as high maintenance as a clingy woman, the electric cars of the future will be as low maintenance as a Spartan man.

Was it as much of an adrenaline rush as reading about regression toward the mean?

Some of the message board software got changed during the most recent update. That includes the list of emoticons. You can tell which emoticons are available by clicking through that little box with the emoticons pictured. The doh.gif emoticon's no longer there, and hasn't been for some time. And yes, I do expect people to be aware of facts like this before they go around criticizing other people's intelligence. Especially when the target of the criticism is yours truly.

My own thinking is that if a criminal wants to shoot you, he doesn't need to break into your house to steal a gun. He has numerous other ways to provide himself with a weapon anyway, so there's no need to go through the added trouble or risk of such a break-in.

Tom and his wife Ramius have a puppy. How cute! Yap, puppy, yap!

Whenever I don't look something up, you accuse me of being lazy. And whenever I do look something up, you accuse me of letting the Internet do my thinking for me.

Expert? Expert! The doh emoticon was your favorite one--you used in practically every post. They took that emoticon away weeks or even months ago. You don't need to be an expert on board emoticons to figure out something as basic as that. You do, however, need a functional brain. And while your brain seems to function quite well some of the time, there are other times when you exhibit no discernible sign of any mental activity at all.

You seem to be thinking of the original definition of jungle: But since then, the word has apparently come to have a different meaning. Here's the definition from Encarta: I was taught that a jungle is typically a transitional step. If you were to clear away a hot, rainy area, and let things grow, you'd get a jungle. But over time, that jungle will turn into a more standard-issue rain forest. The reason for this is that rain forests have leaf canopies, which prevent most light from reaching the ground. Once that canopy fully grows into place, you won't see very much new undergrowth. The undergrowth in older rain forests is a lot thinner and more manageable than is the case for new rain forests/jungles.

I'm sure you know all about projection. Please, tell us more.

Immediately after accusing me of "highlighting [my] own ignorance," you proceed to display your ignorance of the fact that the doh emoticon is no longer available. Ironic, wouldn't you say?

You're right, and I'll go one step further. Say a woman shoots and kills a would-be rapist. Not only has she prevented her own rape, she's just stopped all the other rapes this man would have committed had he been left alive.

Again, it's been a while since I've seen the movie, but I do remember them saying something about the range. IIRC, there was some next-generation battery in the works or something, that gave those cars a longer range. There was a special patent on that battery. After GM abandoned the EV1 project, the company which owns those patent rights was purchased by an oil company. I'm not accusing GM of a conspiracy. The electric car either is or is not technically feasible. If it is, some start up will succeed in bringing it to market. And if it's not technically feasible, nobody can blame GM for abandoning the EV1.

You noticed that gigantic growth on his neck too, did you? At first the doctors thought it was due to an iodine deficiency. Then they thought it was some freakish kind of cancer. But the tests came up negative. Finally they realized the growth on his neck was a swollen ego. Rigorous medical testing made it clear the swelling was starving his brain of blood. Out of the blue, Tom told one doctor that he didn't understand the difference between error and variance. Disturbed by these incoherent babblings, they tried to put him under. "How can you do this to me," he asked, "when you confuse heritability with inheritability?" They performed an operation to reroute blood away from the melon-ego, and back toward his brain. The operation was a success--initially. Tom made a number of intelligent posts about the military. But slowly that ego began reclaiming the brain's blood supply. Tom's eyes began glazing over, and he began muttering about 3.5's and dice. They tried to shake him awake, but to no avail. "Robble," he said when they shook him. So they shook him some more. "Robble, robble," he replied. "Hamburger U. At least I don't go to Hamburger U."

Why prod the bear? 1) the bear was being annoying, 2) UConn James is almost certainly right about this whole gun control thing. The Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear arms. Banning guns for non-militia members is like banning free speech for non-government members. Both bans would completely ignore our Constitutional rights. Moreover, while gun bans might deter law-abiding citizens from bearing arms, it's not clear they have the same effect on criminals. People should have the right to bear arms, and they should have the right to use those arms to defend themselves, their homes, their loved ones, and innocent third parties, from criminal attack. The right to self-defense should be interpreted very broadly. Especially given the current crime situation, anyone who would seek to undermine Second Amendment rights acts against the interests of the American people.

That material is displeasing without being surprising. Our style of government is a little too open to avoid resisting this kind of pressure.